


Depths

by C_Sharpe



Category: Darker Than Black
Genre: Emotions, Gen, Identity Issues, post episode: s01e14
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-08
Updated: 2018-08-08
Packaged: 2019-06-24 01:19:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15619290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/C_Sharpe/pseuds/C_Sharpe
Summary: What does it look like when a Doll has an existential crisis? It doesn't look like much at all. But still waters run deep.





	Depths

**Author's Note:**

> This idea hit me and I poured it out all at once. It might be bad as a result. You can read this as Yin/Hei if you like, though I imagine Yin doesn't have the emotional maturity to actually feel that strongly at this point.

“Kirsi.” She whispered.

 

She sat alone in the dim light of her apartment, tracing the contours of her face with her left hand. Her right hand was dipped into a dish of water positioned on the floor in front of where she kneeled. Certain rare individuals would see a ghostly shape hovering on the surface of the water.

 

She was observing herself, which was a rarity. There was very little utility in observing herself. She was certainly never ordered to do so. Her observations weren’t always limited by her orders, though. She observed her… team mates? Friends? She observed those closest to her with a certain regularity.

 

“Yin.” She whispered.

 

Whose face was this? She had never seen Kirsi’s face. Had never seen anything until that day that the moon vanished behind the false sky. When it was as though something had come and hollowed her out to make room for itself. That had been how it seemed at the time, at any rate. In truth, nothing had been removed. Moved aside, pushed down, perhaps, but not removed. She had always remembered Kirsi. Being Kirsi. Remembered the twined pain of grief and guilt, that hung heavy in her stomach, pressed on her chest, and burned behind her eyes.

 

She remembered her mother. Her father. Her teacher. Remembered the feel of moonlight, the texture of ivory keys and the sound of music echoing through the house. Her mother’s voice. The feeling of her father’s hand. Remembered the night that transformed all of the comforting memories and feelings of her home into sorrow. She vaguely recalled the time between. After her world had ended, but before the gates of heaven and hell opened. Lawyers and unfamiliar voices. An unfamiliar bed. Most of it lost in a mist of tears.

 

When it had come, whatever it was, and where ever it had come from, it had been a blessing. If things had been different, she wondered for a moment, would she have fought against it? Could she have? As it was, she allowed it to come, to push away the guilt and grief, to make her an empty shell who felt nothing and to whom nothing mattered. It had been easy. Easy to sink into this living oblivion. To let the nurses wash her, and feed her. To let the men from the Syndicate take her, hook her to their machines and fill in the blank spaces with directives and orders and rules.

 

Had she become Yin then? When they assigned her the name and the role? Or had she been Yin when the unknown had come and made a home for itself within her? That was the question now. When the contractor had taken her spectre, he had taken a part of her. A part of that unknown within her. It was a violent thing, the taking of it. It had shifted things inside her. Feelings, memories, so long submerged in what seemed like unfathomably deep water, so easy to ignore, to leave alone, had come so close to the surface. Fate had conspired to bring Kirsi’s past into Yin’s present at the same time.

 

The water had sloshed back into place within her once the spectre returned. It would be easy, so easy, to ignore her questions, her feelings, leave them where they had lain for so long. She couldn’t. Didn’t want to. It was hard, reaching for her feelings. They were slick and difficult to hold. They called to her, softly, dimly, from within. When she observed Hei, mostly. She… preferred Hei. Even before her  period of confusion. In the same way she preferred darker, western teas, the comfort of Mao resting in her lap, or the sound of rain on the roof of the tobacco stand. She wouldn’t have described them as desires, or feelings, then.

 

She now knew that she wanted… something from Hei. She didn’t understand what. Made her feel… something. Physically, his touch often produced a reaction in her. As dim and subdued as her emotions, but present. A warm feeling, a desire for closeness. She recognized that feeling, somewhat. Remembered desiring embraces and contact from her parents. Occasionally, it would produce other physical sensations, which she had no context for. She mostly ignored those, as without context they could serve no purpose. Emotionally, he made her feel something, and beyond that, a desire to feel __more__. To be able to breach that deep water and find it in her to return his kind smile.

 

What she desired most from Hei was to ask him. Was she Kirsi, or was she something else? Was she the girl who basked, unseeing in moonlight with a mother and father that loved her, whose short life she remembered? Or was she an invader, who had taken her body and her place in the world? Had she chosen to remain Yin and to remain with Hei because part of her had feared returning to Kirsi would mean the return of Kirsi’s pain? Or, because she knew, somewhere within, that she wasn’t Kirsi, never had been, and couldn’t exist in the life that had belonged to her?

 

Could he answer her? With that strange compassion and wisdom that had compelled Carmine to sacrifice everything for his sake? That had driven him to give her that choice, the implications of which were still shaking her down to the core? Logically, he couldn’t know. In the past, before the contractor had taken a part of her and revealed so much of her, before Hei had unknowingly begun casting lines into those deep waters that separated her from her feelings, she wouldn’t have even pondered it. She would never have bothered to ask the question, much less ask it of someone who had no reasonable hope of answering her.

 

That was before. Now, Yin wanted. Wanted to feel. Wanted to know. Wanted even if wanting made no sense. Even if it promised pain. Even if it would be hard, so hard to find her feelings and desires and actually hold onto them, harder still to somehow translate them into words.

 

Yin observed herself, as her face, pale and expressionless, began to move. Attempted to quirk her mouth and eyes into some type of expression. Would continue to try, because, Yin or Kirsi, she _wanted_.

 

“Hei.” She whispered.

 

She observed something that was almost a smile.


End file.
